A thoughtful summary of what looks like an excellent session at the 2018 Auckland Writers Festival
Fiction and Factions – The University of Auckland Free Public Lecture: Fiona Farrell
What makes a novel political? In the salubrious surrounds of the Heartland Festival Room the expectant gather for Fiona Farrell’s lecture and settle in with their wines. What follows is accomplished, rich and moving (what goes better with wine than sweet words?).
Does the novel’s political status depend on authorial intention or because contemporary political figures are mentioned? And why is it that her most recent work, the novel Decline and Fall on Savage Street, the companion volume to The Villa at the Edge of Empire, is the only one of her works that has been dubbed political?
Fiona agrees with Carol Hanisch that the personal is political; you cannot escape it. Every imagining is inescapably political – all of her own works are political for they are the product and culmination of her Irish ancestors…
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Thanks for this Lisa. Yes, everything is political. My favourite example is the use of the term Anglo/Celtic as though it were neutral when it actually asks us to gloss over hundreds of years of colonisation of Ireland by the English.
By: wadholloway on May 20, 2018
at 11:25 pm
It must have been such a good session, I would love to have been there.
Read this one too: Banishing the White Gaze at the JRB (source of so much that’s good to read) https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2018/05/07/banishing-the-white-gaze-ntombizikhona-valela-reflects-on-winnie-madikizela-mandelas-literary-legacy/
– and then if you haven’t already, read my review of The Cry of Winnie Mandela: https://anzlitlovers.com/2012/11/20/the-cry-of-winnie-mandela-by-njabulo-ndebele-bookreview/
Now *that’s* politics…
By: Lisa Hill on May 21, 2018
at 9:58 am